The Lure of the American Center
TONELSON, ALAN H.
Perspectives THE LURE OF THE AMERICAN CENTER BY ALAN H. TONELSON With the U.S. economy sputtering as it has not done since the '30s, and the country's mood gloomy enough to alarm even President...
...From the very he-ginning, U.S...
...Yet the overwhelming odds are that this year's election campaign will be totally conventional: The major candidates will shun the appearance of extremism as usual, and will compete instead for the nebulous middle...
...Interestingly enough, economics also played a role in undoing them, for the disaffection that feeds radicalism—of both the Left and the Right—mounts during bust periods and vanishes in times of boom...
...Socialists and Communists on the Old Left, Yippies and SDSers on the New, Populists, Coughlinites and McCarthyites on the Right, all have been frustrated through the decades in their efforts to win power...
...Whereas Marxists in Europe are able to mobilize a large urban work force that has a considerable degree of class consciousness, American Leftists seem obliged to spend most of their waking hours talking to themselves...
...Yet since the Civil War, they have not managed to seriously undermine the resiliency of the American center, let alone change the two-party system...
...Such causes, by their very nature, have a tendency to be exclusive rather than inclusive...
...The Populists did attack railroads, wholesalers and other representatives of "big business,' but these targets primarily symbolized exploitation by the Northeast...
...and in stressing pocketbook issues, they would seem to have discovered a means of uniting the disparate discontented factions found at all times in our heterogeneous nation...
...The failure of radicals on the Left raises a somewhat different question...
...The key to the American Left's poor showing lies in the fact that the public refuses to accept the concept of class divisions...
...a new contributor to these pages, is an editor and a free-lance journalist...
...But why, if conditions are so bad, are things not falling apart...
...One of the most effective charges brought against the New Deal was that its notion of a "broker state" arbitrating the demands of competing interest groups smacked of Communism...
...For this reason, perceived attempts to exploit or create class conflict have habitually drawn vehement criticism, and moderate reformers no less than extremists have been the targets of wild attacks when they have tried to confront the problems of genuine economic divisions...
...Eugene V. Debs, who led the Socialists in the early decades of the 20th century, never garnered more than one million votes for the Presidency, and that respectable total he reached but once, in 1912, at the height of the Progressive era...
...The merger of the American Federation of Labor, composed fundamentally of craft unions, with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, made up of industry-wide unions, took place a mere 21 years ago...
...In registering what little success they achieved, for example, the Southern and Midwestern Populists of the 1890s exploited sectional dissatisfactions, black radicals from Marcus Garvey to the Panthers built followings on the basis of race, and Senator Joe McCarthy played on status resentments...
...Regardless of how sick the economic body may be at the moment, though, the electorate this November can fully be expected once again to choose the scalpel of reasoned reform over the guillotine of radicalism...
...Nothing short of a national cataclysm is likely to diminish its lure...
...In 1932, when the economy had come to a virtual halt, they could muster no more than 100,000 votes out of 40 million cast...
...In 1896 Bryan headed the Democratic-Populist ticket against the Republicans' William McKinley...
...A combination of inflation and high unemployment is currently worrying the public, dismaying the politicians and baffling the economists...
...and their nightmares of an insatiable lumpen-proletariat reminiscent of the ancient Roman mobs that brought down the Republic fueled their hatred of him as much as did their belief that the President had "betrayed his own kind" and sold the country to the Bolsheviks...
...The center, then, has retained its magnetic force because it is grounded in a remarkably dogged popular faith in the principles on which this country was founded...
...citizens have wished to build not only a country, but a distinctive civilization, one that rejected the old feudal hierarchies...
...The Communists' showings at the polls throughout the '30s underscored their lack of appeal...
...The splits relied upon by the Populists, black radicals and McCarthyites could be reconciled with the nation's idea of itself...
...What is enabling the center to hold...
...the Garveyites and the Panthers disdained white support except insofar as it aided their black-oriented endeavors...
...Bryan lost, largely because he could never eliminate his campaign's sectional overtones, but the Populists' inability ever again to match the strength they displayed that year can be credited to the return of prosperity in the last part of the decade...
...Alan H. Tonelson...
...True, those outside of the mainstream have often seen their programs and demands coopted by more moderate forces...
...labor has revealed precious little class solidarity...
...They have wandered in a political no-man's land, where they have exerted influence indirectly at most, and frequently after their flame has burned out...
...Even in periods of great hardship, though, they have not attracted mass support...
...Socialists and Communists are not hobbled by exclusivity...
...and the McCarthyites, angry at what they thought the United States had become, offended large portions of the Establishment with their primitive anti-Communism, coming to grief, finally, when they took on the United States Army...
...Despite the disturbances they caused, however, these movements relying on region, race or status were inherently self-limiting...
...economy sputtering as it has not done since the '30s, and the country's mood gloomy enough to alarm even President Ford, the time would seem ripe for the emergence of a broad-based radical movement from either the Left or the Right...
...This is most strikingly illustrated in the case of the Populists...
...With the exception of only the on-again-off-again nativist movement, U.S...
...and although many black radicals, notably the Panthers, claimed to offer a Marxist analysis of American society, their antagonism was really directed at the white power structure...
...The Panic of 1893, and the general depression it sparked, transformed Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan from a regional spokesman to a national figure, bringing American politics to the brink of a major realignment...
...Indeed, only in the past 30 years have the barriers separating skilled and unskilled workers been broken down...
...Populists clearly could not expect very much Northern backing...
...Only groups sparked by non-economic grievances have grown to even meaningful dimensions...
...The abolition of special privileges, and the ideals of social mobility and expanding opportunity, stemmed from the desire to avoid a frozen class system...
...This, according to Franklin D. Roosevelt's critics, was wholly un-American...
...But to concede the validity of the Left's critique would be to concede nothing less than the failure of the entire American experiment...
...American history is peppered with the failures of radical causes...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3
